Formed out of the primordial creative ooze of the San Francisco Bay Area, Oakland’s Once & Future Band is Joel Robinow (keyboards, lead vocals), Raj Ojha (drums, recording / mixing engineer) and Eli Eckert (bass, vocals). For over a decade, Joel, Raj and Eli had worked together (in various combinations) with several bands and projects, including Drunk Horse and Howlin’ Rain. Throughout those years, they often spoke of forming an outlet into which they could combine their love of 60s and 70s psychedelic pop, jazz-rock, fusion and progressive rock, in addition to their myriad other musical fascinations.
These psychonauts have been jamming up a storm and the conserve that rains down upon us is of the finest vintage, spreading flavours of glam-rock, psych-pop and divinely tart, acid-folk-prog across our grainy brains.
These songs will stop you in your tracks so that you can merely absorb how wonderful this album is. there are haunting chorale escorts here…long trains of room warmth…the belting of the machine heart…lofty guitar and bass melange…and just beautifully laid to magnetic tape with a sure hand by the throbbing brains that are once & future band. As John Dwyer (Thee oh Sees) says, this is “for fans of roy wood, idle race, elo, roxy music, head hunters, stevie wonder, paul mccartney, the lord bowie, the band, and the soundtrack from every movie that ever pierced your cold, cold heart”.
“Freaks came after a fight I had with an old girlfriend, which are invariably about pride, and I just thought of this guy ineffectually trying to enact revenge but everyone knows he’s full of shit…was listening to a lot of nillson and ELO then and still, so that’s likely the musical inspiration, I feel like Danny Levin (double D horns) really nailed the vibe, he does all of our horn arrangements by proxy in LA where we mail him the tracks and he Magics them up…if you listen carefully you can hear me saying a mixture of “have someone” and “got someone” in the triple tracked vocals creating a new possessive word Gavt which basically means fool you never had her in the first place.” – Joel Robinow
With 2020 comes the release of their 2nd full length LP, “Deleted Scenes” which has been years in the making. featuring another iconic cover by longtime collaborator Christopher Appelgren.
From the forthcoming album “Deleted Scenes”, out April 10th, 2020 on Castle Face Records.
The Fat Angel Sings 